Stay on target

It’s gotta be nerve-wracking putting out a superhero movie in 2018. There are so many of them, and you know your movie is going to be held up against all the others coming out this year. And this year, the competition’s extra stiff. If you put out a comic book movie in 2018, especially one based on a Marvel property, you’re going up against Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. The two most highly anticipated movies of the year. Every other superhero movie that comes out this year is going to have to step up its trailer game if it wants to stand out. The first footage the public sees better be something really special.

On a completely unrelated note, the first trailer for Sony’s Venom came out this morning.

Well… that’s one way to go about it, I guess. I didn’t think it was possible to know less about a movie after seeing a trailer for it, but here we are. It looks… honestly, I can’t even make a value judgement because it doesn’t really look like anything. It doesn’t tell us anything about the story, or even communicate a consistent mood. We start off with some cool stunts, which… don’t get me wrong, I’m always down to watch cars flip over and crash into each other, but what does that have to do with Venom? Then, we get a lot of Tom Hardy brooding and screaming and writhing. So is this supposed to be going for horror? Because so far, it’s not all that scary. I get that this is just a teaser and a full trailer is probably forthcoming, but it’s not even letting me know why I should be excited for this movie.

Also, there’s no Venom, which is weird for a movie called Venom. There are small hints at the symbiote’s presence. The briefest of shots of the symbiote in a jar, a glimpse of the black goo in Tom Hardy’s veins, and that’s it. If I didn’t know who Venom was, I’d have even less of a clue as to what this movie’s going to be about. Also, it looks like Eddie Brock gets injected with the symbiote as part of an experiment now? Because Spider-Man is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Venom isn’t, so they had to give him a completely new origin. That just makes this movie’s existence weirder. And look, I get why they didn’t want to put Venom in this trailer. They want to make us wait for it. They want to build anticipation. That could have worked if they put any substantial detail in its place. Instead, we get a glorified sizzle reel that looks like someone dropped a movie in a blender, picked out a few random frames, taped them together and called it a trailer.

I’m not even saying this movie looks bad. What action we do see looks fun enough, and Hardy is a great actor. He will almost certainly be very, very good no matter how the rest of the movie turns out. It’s just that I was looking for this trailer to make me care, get me excited about the Lethal Protector getting another chance on the big screen. This didn’t do that.

At least the poster they released yesterday looks cool.

(Via Sony Pictures)

Now that’s how you build hype. It’s funny that this simple, static poster gives us a better look at Venom than a minute-long trailer. Oh well. The very fact that this teaser exists means we’ll get something more substantial soon. Let’s hope that one does a better job of explaining, well, anything at all.